Obliviate
by betruebeyou
Summary: One night, James Potter never came home and three weeks later when he did, it was with an unspeakable mark on his left forearm. When his wife of two and a half years looked into his eyes, she felt nothing but cold and saw nothing but darkness. Lily felt as if there was no hope. However, the Order of the Phoenix was built on this: even when all hope is lost, you fight on.


_Prologue – Worst Nightmares_

_"Light, the visible reminder of invisible light." –T.S. Elliot_

It was four in the morning when Lily Evans—who's name was, at the time, technically Potter by law, but no one dared call her that—was woken up by the sound of a scream for "Mommy." It had been five years and she could still barely believe that she was a mother. She rushed to the second bedroom in her and Harry's tiny home in Godric Hollow. It hadn't been meant to be their home permanently, just long enough for the war to subside. They'd had hope that it would be over soon. That's the way it had seemed. Every day seemed as if it were another day closer to what Lily referred to by herself as 'The Battle.' She anticipated one last battle. One where blood would be shed. Friends would be lost. One, which—she could only hope—they would win.

When she reached her young son's room, she pulled him into her arms. She pulled him close, letting his tears wash onto her sleep shirt. She brushed his dark hair out of his eyes and whispered comforting things to him. She placed a soft kiss on his forehead, but still held on tight. Harry woke up with nightmares, it seemed, almost every other night and when she came in to comfort him, she could rarely tell which one of them was holding on tighter.

The first time Harry described one of his nightmares to Lily, she was frightened beyond anything imaginable. He told her of green flashing lights, and high-pitched, cold screams. Of course, the first thought in her mind was Voldemort, the green lights being the Killing Curse. Her second thought was this: She had never mentioned Voldemort specifically to Harry and most definitely had not clued him in on his notorious use of Avada Kedavra, so how would Harry have had the prior knowledge to dream these things.

Immediately, she sent a patronus to Dumbledore, worried that You-Know-Who had been practicing legilimency on her son. What he replied did little to comfort her. It was very possible that Voldemort had turned to legilimency as an attempt to find Harry Potter, or even just to torment. Luckily, Dumbledore had told her, with no amount of effort could legilimency affect the secrecy of our location. The Fidelius Charm was enough. The only comfort I found in this was that I trusted Sirius Black, our secret keeper. I trusted him with, not only my life, but more importantly, Harry's.

She, however, found no comfort in knowing that Voldemort could torture her son—the light of her life—through his thoughts and his dreams. He was too young—much too young—to deal with a fight like this. Too small to earn the backlash of a war that was born long before he was.

His sobs began to slow down and his breathing went back to normal. However, he kept his head snuggled into the chest of his mother. Lily stroked his hair comfortingly. Harry looked up her, his bright green eyes shining up at her. She thanked any and every higher being for their identical eyes. If he had inherited his father's, she wondered, if she could've beared to look at him.

When she finally got Harry back to sleep, she climbed in under the sheets with him. She barely fit on to his twin size bed, but she took the time to make room. Her arm went dead underneath the weight of his tiny body, but she didn't mind much. The pain was a physical reminder of his presence. He was real. He was there. She still had him.

Lily remembered, with a pang in her chest, the first time Harry had pointed to one of the families in his short children's books, asking where his daddy was. She had only been able to hug her tiny son, and tell him this: that his daddy would be home one day, but that right now he was fighting for them. Which was only half true, James Potter _had_ been fighting for Lily and Harry, but more recently, he was absolved in a more intricate battle of fighting himself.


End file.
